I had the same thought. Cursor 1.0 was cheap and blazingly fast. 1.5 seems to keep the speed, but who knows how much better it is, and it's no longer cheap.

We've found it to be a strong mix of speed and intelligence. It scores higher than Sonnet 4.5 on Terminal-Bench 2, maybe we will post more on this later.

In my experience, Composer is billed like the rest of the models, but Auto mode is billed separately. I recently hit the limit on my plan and was being billed for on demand usage, but using Auto kept it within the "included" allowance (i.e. "free").

I'm not sure how much free usage they give you with Auto mode.